Lately, I’ve been spending some time trying to improve my writing skills in Japanese, which definitely needs some more work. What’s the first step to improving writing skills? By reading of course! So I’ll be sharing with you guys what I’m reading right now on the internet.
I’ve been trying to find some interesting short stories on this online literature magazine called 「破滅波」. I just learned a new expression today: 「音を上げる」 and here 「音」 is read as 「ね」 not 「おと」. It’s from a story called 「僕はガードマン」:
ガードマンという仕事は肉体的にも精神的にもとても疲れる。アルバイト情報誌で時給の高さに惹かれてやってはみたものの、あまりの過酷さに音を上げる毎日だった。
Unfortunately, it’s in Flash so I’ve been using the IME drawing pad to look up Kanji.
One word I thought might be tricky is on page 8:
これは対応を誤ると大事になる。
Here, a group of yakuza is approaching the guardman. By context, 「大事」 doesn’t mean “important” and instead should mean “a big matter” so it should be read as 「おおごと」 and not 「だいじ」.
It’s a fairly short story in an ordinary everyday life setting about how the supposed best people in society act in the worst way and vice-versa.
New Kanji (for me): 憤懣
Category: Everyday life observations
Difficulty: 3/5
My rating: 3/5 stars
Feel free to share any interesting reading you’ve come across.
Are there any sites that offer free pdf/epub stories and books of varying levels of difficulty?
Yes, but the hard part is find stuff that’s interesting.
http://ebook.itmedia.co.jp/ebook/articles/1012/31/news004.html
This is a great idea! I hope you’ll continue making posts like this. I especially like the “new kanji” and “unusual reading” notes. Really great post 🙂 Keep it up!
Actually you can copy and paste from that.
I found it only works when your in “full screen” mode though. You press the button on the top right hand corner of the flash area.
Or you can just go directly to this link.
http://hametuha.com/syoko/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/bokuhaguardman.swf
Then you press the button to the right of the hand for text selection.
You can now highlight text. Now just press ctrl+c. You have to (at least for me) hold “ctrl” then press “c” a couple of times for it to actually copy.
Very useful and probably much faster than using the IME.
This seems like an interesting story so I might try reading it.
Thanks for pointing it out.
Interesting finding with daiji and oogoto. For a second there I thought I might have something in my deck that should be oogto rather than daiji but loOking it up the card in my srs, the card says like daiji ni itaranakatta and the meaning is sorta similar to the way oogto was used. By the dictionary examples it definitely is daiji in my srs card’s case.